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During the semester, I shall post course material and students will comment on it. Students are also free to comment on any aspect of American politics, either current or historical. There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges. This blog is on the open Internet, so post nothing that you would not want a potential employer to see. Syllabus: http://gov20h.blogspot.com/2023/08/draft-introduction-to-american-politics.html

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Holiday Shopping

According to The National Retail Federation, there was a decline of 5.1 million people out shopping this year on Black Friday compared to last year. That is 7% fewer people. Furthermore, retailers that opened their doors on Thanksgiving night found a decrease of 1.8 million shoppers compared to those of last year. Overall, 5% fewer shoppers visited the stores from Thanksgiving through Sunday than they did last year.
What is certain, however, is that more people are shopping online than ever before, and the deals are becoming less concentrated to the 4 days from Thanksgiving through Monday. As a result, stores are getting ready for a more spread out timeframe of peoples holiday shopping. What's more, there was an increase of 10% in online shopping on Black Friday. Surprisingly, according to the NRF, we will see a slump in Cyber Monday shopping as well as retailers spread their deals out throughout the month.
Two things are certain from this. That for reasons of convenience and for better deals, we will see more online shopping this year than ever before. However, the current decreases in holiday shopping are not on account of a worsening economy or peoples fear of spending too much money. Despite the NRF's belief that we will see a slump in Cyber Monday spending, they are sticking to their estimate that we will see an increase of 4.1% in total holiday spending from this year over last year, and that a greater percentage of that spending will be done online. We will have to wait and see how things pan out tomorrow (today) and for the rest of the holiday season, but these predictions seem very reasonable.
Now for another bit of news about Black Friday: http://www.theonion.com/articles/42-million-dead-in-bloodiest-black-friday-weekend,30517/

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